Order management systems are computer software and/or hardware systems implemented by a number of industries to facilitate order entry and processing. Companies, such as catalog companies and those utilizing electronic commerce, use order management systems to receive, process and fulfill customer orders. An order management system makes possible the entering of an order via a website shopping cart or data entry system. The system typically captures customer-related information and/or account level information for each order. Credit verification or payment processing may then be performed to check for available funds and validate the transaction. Valid orders are processed for warehouse fulfillment, including picking, packing and shipping of the ordered goods or services.
In general, most order management system are designed to have a single representation of a product end-to-end in an order lifecycle, which results in a sales-centric view of the product, and results in a fulfillment-centric view of the product being the same on the order. This results in many of the product details that are required for the purpose of fulfillment also being present on the sales order. When an order is entered in an order capture system, the fulfillment-related product details are also included on the order, which results in the order capture system being required to deal with fulfillment-centric complexity.